ting, is the work of
genius. There is no intellectual distinction in the enjoyment of "The
Pickwick Papers"; to write "The Pickwick Papers" would be another
matter.

It is only in the last quarter of a century that English literature has
been accepted not as a recreation, but as a subject of serious study.
Now, the first necessity for a study is that it should be "hard." Some
of the best brains in the educational world have been enlisted in the
work of giving a disciplinary value to what was originally an innocent
pleasure. It is evident that one cannot give marks for the number of
smiles or tears evoked by a tale of true love. The novel or the play
that is to hold its own in the curriculum in competition with
trigonometry must have some knotty problem which causes the harassed
reader to knit his brows in anxious thought.

In answer to this demand, the literary craftsman has arisen who takes
his art with a seriousness which makes the "painful preacher" of the
Puritan time seem a mere pleasure-seeker. Equipped with instruments of
precision drawn from the psychological laboratory, he is prepared to
satisfy our craving for the difficult By the method of suggestion he
tries to make us believe that we have never seen his characters before,
and sometimes he succeeds. He deals in descriptions which leave us with
the impression of an indescribable something which we should recognize
if we were as clever as he is. As we are not nearly so clever, we are
left with a chastened sense of our inferiority, which is doubtless good
for us. And all this groping for the un-obvious is connected with an
equally insistent demand for realism. The novel must not only be as real
as life, but it must be more so. For life, as it appears in our ordinary
consciousness, is full of illusions. When these are stripped off and the
residuum is compressed into a book, we have that which is at once
intensely real and painfully unfamiliar.

Now, there is a certain justification for this. A psychologist may show
us aspects of character which we could not see by ourselves, as the
X-rays will reveal what is not visible to the naked eye. But if the
insides of things are real, so also are the outsides. Surfaces and forms
are not without their importance.

It may be said in extenuation of Dickens that the blemish of obviousness
is one which he shared with the world he lived in. It would be too much
to say that all realities are obvious. There is a great deal t